Emerging multidisciplinary research across database

management systems
Anisoara Nica1, Fabian M. Suchanek2 * and Aparna S. Varde3
1. Sybase iAnywhere, Waterloo, ON, Canada
2. INRIA Saclay, Paris, France
3. Department of Computer Science, Montclair State University, Montclair, NJ, USA
anica@sybase.com, fabian@suchanek.name, vardea@montclair.edu

ABSTRACT Leveraging Logical and Statistical Inference in Ontology

The database community is exploring more and more
multidisciplinary avenues: Data semantics overlaps with
ontology management; reasoning tasks venture into the
domain of artificial intelligence; and data stream
management and information retrieval shake hands, e.g.,
when processing Web click-streams. These new research
avenues become evident, for example, in the topics that
doctoral students choose for their dissertations. This
paper surveys the emerging multidisciplinary research by
doctoral students in database systems and related areas. It
is based on the PIKM 2010, which is the 3rd Ph.D.
workshop at the International Conference on Information
and Knowledge Management (CIKM). The topics
addressed include ontology development, data streams,
natural language processing, medical databases, green
energy, cloud computing, and exploratory search. In
addition to core ideas from the workshop, we list some
open research questions in these multidisciplinary areas.
1. SURVEY OF TOPICS
Our survey groups the topics of the workshop
into six research domains. We start with two core areas of
database research, data mining and stream processing. We
proceed to the sister domain of database management,
Information Retrieval, before venturing into Information
Extraction and the relatively new area of Privacy and
Trust. We conclude with an application-driven domain,
data warehouse management. We shed light on new
research proposals in each of these domains, as well as on
open issues.
1.1. Data mining
Data mining, the science of discovering
meaningful knowledge in data, has always been a core
area of database research. Nowadays, with the advent of
large semantic knowledge bases, the area faces new
challenges, for example with the task of integrating and
aligning ontologies. The keynote of our workshop,
Alignment [9] by Professor Renée J. Miller from the
University of Toronto, gave an overview on the work
done in this area. It also presented a new approach,
“Integrated Learning In Alignment of Data and Schema”
(ILIADS), which combines data matching and logical
reasoning to achieve better matching of ontologies.
Professor Miller ended her talk with advice for graduate
students based on her own experience – both as a student
and as a graduate adviser.
Another problem in the area of data mining is
frequent subgraph mining. Garcia et al. [5] study this
problem with techniques available inside a database
management system. Three fundamental research
problems under a database approach are discussed:
efficient graph storage and indexing, searching for
frequent subgraphs and finding subgraph isomorphism
using SQL. The solutions toward these problems are
outlined, together with the preliminary experimental
validation, focusing on query optimizations and time
complexity.
Park et al. [13] research the issue of finding
statistical correlations among pairs of attribute values in
relational database systems. By extending the Bayesian
network models the authors provide a probabilistic
ranking function based on a limited assumption of value
independence. Experimental results show that the
proposed model improves the retrieval effectiveness on
real datasets and has a reasonable query processing time
compared to previous related work.
Discussions with the speakers at the workshop
pointed to open research avenues in the area of data
mining in general. One such avenue, inspired by the
keynote talk, is investigating the usefulness of data
mining in the Semantic Web: Data can be mined from the
Semantic Web (for tasks such as summarization or
alignment) as well as for the Semantic Web (with the
purpose of adding new knowledge to an ontology). The
interplay of these two directions appears still largely
unexplored.

*
The work by Fabian Suchanek has been partially funded by the European Research Council under the European Community's Seventh
Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) / ERC grant Webdam, agreement 226513. http://webdam.inria.fr/
1.2. Stream processing
As more and more data (such as sensor data)
becomes available in the form of continuous streams, new
avenues of research open up. Amiguet et al. [2], for
example, address the issue of semantic changes
(annotations) in the stream data processing of sensor
networks. The propagation of annotations through the
workflow, as part of the data processing, raises interesting
research questions related to how the propagation
depends on the structural and temporal contributions, and
on the annotation significance. The work shows its
practical viability through a case study from a climate
forecasting application that processes temperature sensor
data. This paper won the best paper award in the PIKM
2010 workshop.
Another problem in stream processing is the
adaptation of the system to different utilizations. Farag et
al. [4] propose new algorithms for providing good data
stream system performance during periods of peak load
and periods of delays. The “External Memory Sliding
Window Join” (EM-SWJoin) algorithm utilizes external
memory data structures to adapt to the variable data
arrival rates while keeping disk access latency at
minimum. The “ADaptive Execution of DAta Streams”
(ADEDAS) algorithm guarantees ordered release of
output results to the user/application while controlling the
impact of delays over stream processing. Thus, it
addresses the problem of releasing output results in an
increasing order of timestamp when the input data items
arrive out-of order. The authors exemplify their approach
through a system that monitors online stocks.
In some scenarios, several data streams come
together. Huq et al. [6] discuss how different data streams
can be coordinated, how storage space can be optimized
and how the database state can be kept consistent in a
distributed scenario. The main application the authors
have in mind is sensor-based experiments, for example
based on motion sensors.
This last talk brought up the idea to investigate
column-oriented data representations in data stream
environments. Such a representation will require stronger
coordination (horizontally in addition to vertically), but
might potentially improve output efficiency and overall
system performance.
1.3. Information retrieval
Recent years have seen an opening up of the
border between the database research and information
retrieval. Storing data and querying data go hand in hand,
and this applies to both structured data and unstructured
data. In many scenarios, queries can be classified into
“lookup searches” and “exploratory searches”. In lookup
searches, users “look up” details on topics known to
them; in exploratory searchers they “explore” new
information. Mirizzi et al. [10] propose to combine these
two concepts. They present a Web-based tool called
“Lookup Discover Explore” (LED) that improves lookup
search by adding exploration capabilities. LED supports a
lookup step, an exploratory step and a meta search
process. Given a keyword query, their system can display
DBpedia resources with a graph explorer, a ranker and a
context analyzer. One of the contributions of their work is
a novel approach to browsing by exploiting the Semantic
Web.
Di Buccio et al. [3] address the related problem
of querying a document collection with short textual
queries. Newer systems use relevance feedback from
different sources of evidence. In this paper, the authors
propose a uniform model for these evidence sources.
One area of Information Retrieval that is gaining
more and more attention lately is the exploitation of the
deep Web. Tjin-Kam-Jet [17] proposes to address this
challenge in a distributed environment. Given the fact that
the deep Web is up to two orders of magnitude larger than
the surface Web, they argue that distribution might be the
key to scalability. This work proposes to automatically
convert free-text queries to structured queries for complex
web forms in order to make the deep web more easily
searchable. Challenges include developing a formal query
description syntax, translating queries with correct
interpretation, bridging the gap between user expectations
and system capabilities, adapting query description for
resource selection, ranking top k resources, merging
results from resources to maximize precision, recall and
suggestion ranking for users with respect to resources. He
aims to evaluate this solution with a prototype system and
user studies, criteria being processing time and user
satisfaction.
Discussions following the talk [17] brought up
the idea of studying distributed deep web searches in the
context of handheld mobile devices. As mobile devices
become practically ubiquitous (and reasonably powerful,
too), it might become possible to utilize their capacities
for distributed query processing.
1.4. Information extraction
Information extraction, in its widest sense, is the
extraction of structured data from unstructured data. One
domain where large corpora of unstructured text would
particularly benefit from information extraction is the
medical domain. Raghavan et al. [15] are concerned with
extracting information from medical reports. A medical
report is a natural language description of diagnoses,
treatments or medications, together with structured
information about the patient. The goal is to extract a
chronology of events from the reports. Such chronologies
can then be used to review a patient’s history or to gather
statistical data about the effectiveness or consequences of
medical treatments. The task is challenging, because the
reports use medical jargon and colloquial temporal
expressions (“two days ago”). The paper conducts two
initial case studies: In the first, machine learning on
medical reports is used to determine whether patients
qualify for Leukemia trials. In the second, a bio-specimen
repository is augmented with data from medical reports.
This additional data facilitates the classification of tissue
probes and also information retrieval on the specimen
database.
Kliegr [7] discusses the problem of noun phrase
classification: Given a noun phrase (such as an image
caption) and given a set of classes (such as “Nature” or
“City”), the task is to assign a class to the noun phrase.
This problem is challenging, because the classes are user-
defined and the noun phrases do not necessarily have
context. The paper proposes to map the noun phrase to a
weighted set of related Wikipedia articles (a “bag of
articles”, BOA). Likewise, each class is mapped to a
BOA. Then, the classification problem is reduced to
determining the similarity between the noun phrase BOA
and the class BOAs.
This last talk [7] has shown us that the
possibilities that Wikipedia offers for information
extraction are not yet fully exploited. The first talk [15]
has pointed us to an area where Information Extraction
(and possibly data mining) could find attractive
applications: the medical domain.
1.5. Privacy and Trust
As more and more data is being produced, stored
and made public, issues such as security, trust and privacy
gain more and more attention. Consider for example
pervasive health care systems. These are systems that
monitor medical indicators on the patient and send their
data to a medical center. These systems can greatly
increase efficiency and safety, but come with the problem
of data security. Acharya et al. [1] address the possible
security threats in pervasive health care systems. One
particular security loophole is the need to exchange
encryption keys. The paper proposes a communication
scheme that eliminates the need to broadcast encryption
keys.
Security and trust are even more obvious issues
when it comes to sharing data in cloud computing
systems. Driven by this insight, Thorpe [16] develops a
trust paradigm for the cloud. The paper considers
interactions, reputation, knowledge and experience with
respect to the cloud. Concepts such as user trust, cloud
trust, cloud trust peer and cloud distrust are defined and
an algorithm is proposed for a trust cloud context graph.
The algorithm takes all the variables into account that are
relevant to the cloud, i.e., machines, storage components
and connected nodes. This encourages work on a context-
neutral autonomous cloud monitor agent.
Just as [15], the authors of [1] target the medical
domain. We take this as an indication that this domain
can attract research from different areas of computer
science, including security, privacy, data management,
information extraction and systems research.
1.6. Workflow and Management
Research in databases can also touch quite
practical issues such as the management of data centers.
As data centers grow larger and larger and ever more
powerful, pragmatic concerns such as heat management
and environmental compatibility arise. Pawlish et al. [14],
for example, are concerned with the environment-friendly
management of data centers. The ultimate aim is to
provide the data center manager with a tool that can help
decide management questions, such as whether to buy
new hardware and what hardware, in order to minimize
the environmental impact of the facility. For this purpose,
the paper first explains what data is necessary to support
such decisions. These include, e.g., data on energy use,
humidity, acoustic levels, and the carbon footprint of the
center. For proof of concept, the authors have collected
such data for one data center. Then, the paper proposes to
build decision trees on top of these data and to use case
based reasoning in order to determine economically
sensible management steps. The paper outlines this
framework supported by some real world examples.
Another issue in data warehousing environments
is the problem of consistent data quality. As warehousing
environments are often dynamically changing the quality
of various resources and also the users’ quality
requirements, there is a need to capture quality changes
on-the-fly and also provide automated quality
notifications back to end users. Therefore, Li et al. [8]
propose an extended data warehousing systems
architecture that incorporates and extends the concepts of
the “Quality Factory” (QF) and the “Quality Notification
Service” (QNS), and adopts the “Data Warehouse
Quality” (DWQ) methodology to provide both subjective
and objective quality assessments of the end-users’
quality requirements.
Apart from quality, efficiency of processes is
also almost always an issue. Naseri et al. [11] are
concerned with optimizing workflow management. They
propose to systematically store, analyze and mine data
about successful workflow executions in order to
optimize workflow composition, workflow selection and
workflow refinement.
Discussions during the workshop were
particularly attracted to the concept of managing data
warehouses. This area touches not just several domains of
computer science (such as storage, querying, and quality
estimation), but also other domains such as economics,
the environmental sciences and the legal domain. The
talks in this session have raised awareness for the
practical impacts of our ever-growing amounts of data,
their quality and their storage.
2. CONCLUSIONS
This paper presents a short survey of emerging
research across database systems and related areas. It
focused on the work that doctoral students presented at
the PIKM workshop in ACM CIKM 2010. From a
research point of view, the work is spread over areas as
diverse as information extraction and workflow
management, stream processing and security. From an
application point of view, the work is concerned with
cloud computing systems, sensor networks, practical
aspects of data warehouse management and Web search.
The medical domain with its applications has also
attracted particular interest. The new research proposals
as well as discussions with the students have illuminated
some of the new research avenues in the domain of
databases and beyond.
3. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We sincerely thank the CIKM 2010 organizers for their
help and support in organizing the Ph.D. workshop
PIKM. In particular we thank the General Chair, Jimmy
Huang and the Workshops Chair, Mounia Lalmas, for
their cooperation. We also express our sincere gratitude
towards the 24 PC members of PIKM, spread over 12
countries across the globe. They comprised well-known
experts from industry and academia and their exhaustive
reviews helped to make this workshop a fruitful and
enriching experience. All of this helped set the stage for
writing this article.
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